Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Star Wars Made Real

Jack Hitt recently wrote an amazing story on the failures of missile defense for Rolling Stone. The tag-line of the article says it all: “The Shield Star Wars began as a Reagan-era fantasy. Under Bush, it is now the most expensive weapons system in the history of man. It has never been successfully tested. It will never be finished. And it is completely unnecessary.”

Included below are a few exceptional paragraphs:

The geopolitics of missile defense are every bit as troublesome as the science. Even the Missile Defense Agency concedes that the shield -- originally envisioned as a defense against a rival superpower -- is no longer of any use against China or Russia. A colorful brochure produced by the agency to make the case for expansion of the shield into Europe confesses that "Russia's large strategic offensive force could overwhelm the U.S. system's limited number of deployed interceptors." Even in a direct, one-on-one engagement, the brochure concedes, "U.S. interceptors in central Europe would not be capable of intercepting Russian ICBMs launched at the United States."

Having abandoned its superpower mission, the shield has morphed under Donald Rumsfeld into an all-purpose defense for the Age of Terrorism. For the last few years, the Bush administration has promoted the shield as protection against rogue states like North Korea and Iran. But the State Department recently reached a diplomatic agreement with North Korea that would eliminate its nuclear weapons program, and Iran is years away from developing nuclear capabilities. So whose warheads will the shield protect us from? In August, during a lecture at a missile defense convention, one proponent of the system suggested the possibility of a new ballistic threat from a country that currently possesses no missiles: Venezuela.

While America focuses on hypothetical threats, other nations are taking real-world actions in direct response to missile defense. Last year, China demonstrated its offensive capacity by "painting" one of our satellites with a laser -- the outer-space equivalent of sighting it with a rifle scope -- and earlier this year, the Chinese military demonstrated its might by blowing one of its own satellites out of the sky. The shield has also soured America's relations with Russia, which views our plans to install silos for interceptors in central Europe as the equivalent of the Cuban missile crisis. In response, Vladimir Putin has threatened to aim a new generation of missiles directly at the heart of Europe, and in July he withdrew from a treaty crafted by President George H.W. Bush that limits the number of troops and tanks Russia can position close to Europe.

This, to date, is the only real accomplishment of missile defense: The shield has effectively killed old arms-control treaties and ended deterrence. The arms race is back, only this time it's multilateral. China has officially chest-butted us in space, and Russia intends to aim missiles at Europe while massing troops at the borders of our allies. America, in return, gets the comfort of the shield.

Click here for the full story.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm in the midst of reading that story. Re: ". . . is no longer of any use against China or Russia."

A stunning admission -- not only does it remove Missile Defense far from Reagan's initial justification for the system, it makes the whole thing look almost like a New Deal public works project.

Except in this case, it neither helps nor profits the public.

To ignore this little caveat, congress must have been lobbied up the yin-yang.

Meanwhile, beware of Venezuela!

Anonymous said...

Russ, although I am skeptical of the efficacy of missile defense, I must say that this isn't a stunning admission -- especially if you brush up on the long history of attempts to defend actively against nuclear threats. (By the way, this is a history in which some heroes of contemporary arms controllers, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe, played key roles as early supporters of active defense. But I digress.)

Concepts for ABM/BMD systems have always existed on a continuum:

* On one end, there were "thick" ABM/BMD systems (such as Reagan's ultimate vision of a SDI and a defense-dominant world), which were envisioned as defending, with a high probability, against a large number of missile launches by an opponent.

* At the other end, there were "thin" ABM/BMD systems, which aim to defend against only a small number of deliberately launched missiles, or an errant missile launched in an accidental or unauthorized manner.

To the extent that ABM/BMD systems have ever been feasible (and although they were truly technically feasible when their interceptors were tipped with nuclear warheads, the use of such nuclear-armed interceptors had very awful drawbacks), ABM/BMD systems on the "thin" end of the spectrum have been the most feasible.

A key question, though, has always been how much Uncle Sam would/should be willing to pay for such an effective "thin" ABM/BMD capability.

keithedwhite said...

What role if any does funding for AMB/BMD have in concerns over the possible aim of American nuclear primacy?

Let's say there are two goals: 1) stopping errant missiles, small launches from countries and 2) having the ability to launch a nuclear attack on any other country without detection.

What role does AMB/BMD have in the latter goal?

I'm taking this off Lieber and Press' Foreign Policy article in which they write:

"To determine how much the nuclear balance has changed since the Cold War, we ran a computer model of a hypothetical U.S. attack on Russia's nuclear arsenal using the standard unclassified formulas that defense analysts have used for decades. We assigned U.S. nuclear warheads to Russian targets on the basis of two criteria: the most accurate weapons were aimed at the hardest targets, and the fastest-arriving weapons at the Russian forces that can react most quickly. Because Russia is essentially blind to a submarine attack from the Pacific and would have great difficulty detecting the approach of low-flying stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, we targeted each Russian weapon system with at least one submarine-based warhead or cruise missile. An attack organized in this manner would give Russian leaders virtually no warning."

Anonymous said...

Although I doubt the efficacy of even "thin" ABM/BMD systems at this point, I do not think that such systems could realistically give U.S. strategic nuclear forces to launch a "splendid first-strike" on Russia strategic nuclear forces, or anything close.

That said, Lieber and Press' articles in American Political Science Review and Foreign Affairs -- articles that were provocative to the point of carelessness -- have encouraged the view that ABM/BMD would enable a credible "knock-out blow" against Russian nuclears.

I attended a talk/dinner in which Lieber and Press presented their "analysis," which basically consisted of plugging CEP, warhead yield and target hardness data into spreadsheets, to calculate SSKPs, etc., for a US attempt at a "splendid first-strike" with forces in reserve. This analysis is Mickey Mouse for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that Lieber and Press did not consider a range of relatively cheap improvements in Russians operations -- such as improved nuclear sub ops, to increase the survivability of SLBMs, or moving ICBMs to HDBTs, say, within mountains.

More to the point, planners should rule out such an attack because the blowback on such a numerically large attack would hit hard our own allies. When you move beyond the spreadsheet, and consider other factors, you realize that Russians could do a lot of things, cheaply and quickly, to assure a second-strike capability and continuing command and control; in trying to knockout Russian forces, and given the awful side-effects of such a numerically large attack, what sort of political purpose could that further?

The real end result of Lieber and Press' polemic is that they've given Russian autocrats a wonderful excuse to portray the West as the enemy of Russia, and move Russia away from integration with the West.

The assumption behind Lieber and Press' arguments, that qualitative improvements to our military forces are bad, is a stupid one.

Can't arms controllers finally admit that -- had the US undertaken qualitative improvements (such as improved CEPs, improved command-and-control), as folks like Jeremy Stone, Jerry Wiesner, Herbert York, and even Henry Kissinger etc. were arguing in the 1970s -- then Kissinger (in his latter incarnation), Schultz, Nunn and Perry wouldn't have been able to write their WSJ op-ed calling for drastic cuts in nuclear arsenals and increased reliance on nonnuclears? In short, that qualitative improvements (whether in offense or defense) can sometimes, in the net, be a really good thing?